Gender Questions

Despite the examination of digital rights and privacy for marginalised communities within the human rights field and funding, trans* stories and needs are often marginalised and ignored. This article explores the lived realities of US-based trans* communities online. Two example cases are used to demonstrate how the current rhetoric around digital security and privacy does not take into account trans* perspectives. The article ends with some recommendations to improve the field of digital security and conversations on the intersection of trans* communities and digital rights.

JACK HALBERSTAM is Professor of English, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York City. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995); Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998); In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005); The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011); and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012). They have written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam is currently working on several projects, including a book titled Wild Things: Queerness After Nature. Here they are interviewed by Chantelle Gray van Heerden for Gender Questions on transgenderism, anarchism and other aspects of identity and queerness.

CHANTELLE GRAY VAN HEERDEN: Over the past few years there has been a noticeable increase of transgender people in movies and television series. We may think here, for example, of the movie The Danish Girl, the Amazon series Transparent, Jamie Clayton in the Sense8 and Laverne Cox from Orange is the New Black. One of the most pertinent issues here is the representation of transgender people who are often, though not exclusively (as the list above suggests), played—and therefore portrayed— by cisgender people. Do you think this kind of representation is problematic? I am also wondering if you think that this kind of transgender mainstreaming glosses over the very personal and deeply affecting emotions experienced by transgender people before, during and after coming out and/or transitioning.

This paper reads Deleuze-Guattarian and new materialist theories alongside two landmark works of speculative science fiction by Angela Carter and Octavia Butler that queer normative conceptualisations of gender and sexuality. These theoretical and fictional explorations argue that subjectivity should be reconceptualised as immanent rather than fixed. Utilising uncanny affective registers, they attempt to push rigid ideas about gender/sex toward more fluid configurations that affirm a heterogeneity of lived experiences, situating subjectivity along lines of becoming. To execute such moves, Deleuze and Guattari propose a kind of experimental and experiential rupturing process; a mechanism for accessing what is immanent to everyday experience, rather than governmental. This is particularly useful for exploring transgender and other minoritarian subjectivities. By invoking breaks or ruptures from habituated ways of thinking and feeling, as these philosophers suggest, writers, artists and theorists might succeed in creating points of emergence around which new configurations and relations of gender-fluid identities might coalesce. I will investigate how Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Carter and Butler, who wrote before the emergence of transgender studies during the 1990s, paved the way for nomadic conceptions of sexuality, gender and lived contradiction.